Moon Express says first launch is ‘definitely’ happening in 2018

Moon Express, a company planning to mine material on the moon, is “definitely” going to launch its first mission next year, and could have human colonies there within five years, Chairman Naveen Jain told CNBC on Thursday.

In January, the company said that it was targeting a date in late 2017 to send its lander to the moon. But that has been pushed back until 2018.

“It’s definitely going to be next year, we are in the final stretches of it. And as you can imagine it’s rocket science,” Jain told CNBC in a TV interview from the Slush technology conference in Helsinki, Finland.

“We are really looking good and we are still hoping to launch the lander next year. And when we launch and land on the moon, not only (do) we become the first company to do so, we actually symbolically become the fourth superpower. And imagine the entrepreneurs doing things that only the three superpowers have done before.”

Superpowers such as the U.S. and Russia have previously landed on the moon.

Moon Express is the first private company to get U.S. government approval to go to the moon. Landing there would be a historic feat.

Cataclysmic ‘super eruption’ is MUCH closer than we thought, warns latest research

Scientists at Bristol University have analysed geological records from the last 100,000 years

By Stephen Beech

(Image: Moment RF)

We may be much nearer to a cataclysmic volcanic ‘super-eruption’ than previously thought, warns new research.

That is the conclusion of Bristol University scientists after analysing a database of geological records dated within the last 100,000 years.

They discovered the average time between so-called volcanic super-eruptions is actually much less than previously understood.

Volcanoes and ‘bolides’ – such as asteroids – are geohazards powerful enough to be destructive on a global scale.

One recent assessment described them as capable of returning humanity to a ‘pre-civilisation’ state.

The largest explosive eruptions are termed ‘super-eruptions’, and produce in excess of 1,000 gigatons of erupted mass – enough to blanket an entire continent with volcanic ash, and change global weather patterns for decades.

The only supermoon of the year will rise Sunday evening

The only supermoon of 2017 will appear in a sky near you Sunday night … weather permitting.

Bigger and brighter than a typical full moon, the term “supermoon” was coined in 1979 by astrologer Richard Nolle. According to NASA, it’s used by the media today to describe what astronomers would call a perigean full moon: a full moon occurring near or at the time when the moon is at its closest point in its orbit around Earth.

A supermoon can appear as much as 14% bigger and 30% brighter than when a full moon is at its farthest distance from Earth, NASA said.

The astronomical term for a supermoon is “perigee syzygy.” (Syzygy is when the sun, moon and Earth are all aligned in a straight line.)

The exact moment of the full moon is the morning of Dec. 3 at 10:46 a.m. ET, (9:46 a.m. CT, 8:46 a.m. MT, and 7:46 a.m. PT), Space.com said.

Researchers in Belgium have come upon a René Magritte painting that harbors a long-sought secret.

In the early 1930s, the Belgian artist was poor enough that he reused canvases, painting over one work with another. In one case, he cut one of his paintings—The Enchanted Pose (1927)—into four pieces and painted over each one to create discrete new works. Now, researchers have discovered the fourth and final piece of the original work, solving an 85-year-old mystery.

The work was unearthed at none other than the Magritte Museum, in Brussels, Belgium, where researchers were inspecting all the paintings in the collection as part of a larger research project.

“I screamed something like ‘Oh my gosh!’ but less polite,” said Catherine Defeyt, a researcher at the University of Liège’s European Center for Archaeometry, of the moment of the discovery.

Pieces of the puzzle have been coming to light for four years; the three other pieces were found in three other major museums.

The first piece, The Portrait (1935), was uncovered by curator Anne Umland and conservator Michael Duffy at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2013. It shows two identical female nudes side by side, each with an arm resting on a broken column.

The whereabouts of the original painting were listed in the Magritte catalogue raisonné as unknown; the only existing photo of it was in black and white. Umland and Duffy were inspecting The Portrait by way of conservation research in preparation for an exhibition there.

The Worst Theoretical Prediction in the History of Physics

When it comes to scientifically mysterious concepts that begin with the word “dark,” dark matter attracts most of the public attention. Dark energy, however, constitutes 68.3% of the mass of the universe compared to dark matter’s paltry 26.8% (and normal matter’s minuscule 4.9%). It is truly the more consequential of the two “dark” concepts.

Yet we’ll never likely be able to “catch” a particle of dark energy as scientists are striving to do with dark matter. That’s because dark energy is – most likely – just the energy inherent to space, itself, perhaps arising from Quantum foam, composed of virtual particles that flit in and out of existence. As Einstein reminds us, the energy delivered by these virtual particles briefly protruding into space has mass.

Self-driving cars programmed to decide who dies in a crash

by Todd Spangler, Detroit Free Press

WASHINGTON — Consider this hypothetical:

It’s a bright, sunny day and you’re alone in your spanking new self-driving vehicle, sprinting along the two-lane Tunnel of Trees on M-119 high above Lake Michigan north of Harbor Springs. You’re sitting back, enjoying the view. You’re looking out through the trees, trying to get a glimpse of the crystal blue water below you, moving along at the 45-mile-an-hour speed limit.

As you approach a rise in the road, heading south, a school bus appears, driving north, one driven by a human, and it veers sharply toward you. There is no time to stop safely, and no time for you to take control of the car.

Does the car:

A. Swerve sharply into the trees, possibly killing you but possibly saving the bus and its occupants?

B. Perform a sharp evasive maneuver around the bus and into the oncoming lane, possibly saving you, but sending the bus and its driver swerving into the trees, killing her and some of the children on board?

C. Hit the bus, possibly killing you as well as the driver and kids on the bus?

In everyday driving, such no-win choices are may be exceedingly rare but, when they happen, what should a self-driving car — programmed in advance — do? Or in any situation — even a less dire one — where a moral snap judgment must be made?

Manson — who infamously wore a swastika tattoo between his eyebrows — had spent more than 45 years in prison after being convicted of directing his “Manson Family” clan of troubled, mostly female, followers to kill seven people in California in the summer of 1969. The dead included actress Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski, who was stabbed 16 times.

“I am crime,” Manson proudly proclaimed during a collect call to The Post from prison in the mid-2000s.

Born on Nov. 12, 1934, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to a prostitute named Kathleen Maddox, Manson was officially dubbed “no name Maddox” at birth and apparently never knew his biological father.

Farewell to Malcolm Young, the Mastermind of AC/DC

Picture yourself, if you will, at an AC/DC show at some unruly venue in Albany or Toledo in the fall of 1978. Perhaps a friend has brought you, or maybe hearing one of the band’s songs on FM radio has drawn you there. Regardless, you’re in luck. You’re catching AC/DC at the perfect moment, as it’s on the cusp of transforming itself into a musical juggernaut. The group, hailing from Australia, has just released “Powerage,” a forty-minute distillation of swinging, aggressive rock and roll that Keith Richards will later say is his favorite AC/DC album. In a matter of months, the band will record “Highway to Hell” and, soon after that, “Back in Black,” which will become the sixth-best-selling album of all time.

So, what do you notice? Up front and hard to miss is Angus Young, the diminutive dynamo of a lead guitarist, wearing the sweat-soaked remains of a velvet schoolboy uniform, duck-walking and thrashing his head like the lightning-strike victim on the cover of “Powerage.” Nearby, prancing bare-chested, is the lewd and mischievous lead singer, Bon Scott. (He’ll be dead by the end of the decade.) But, if you can take your eyes off these two showmen for a moment, you might find your gaze drifting to the left of the drum riser, where a pugnacious long-haired kid (he looks like he’s still in high school), wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, is strumming his Gretsch guitar and shaking his leg in time to the driving beat. His name is Malcolm Young, and you could be forgiven for seeing him as just another part of the backing band, but he is in fact the mastermind of the whole operation, at once its visionary and its taskmaster. He is the soul of the band, its leader on and off the stage.

Let’s Restart the Adoption Movement

That’s what I found in my research for a book I was writing back in 2003. Data clearly showed that giving and volunteering have a positive impact on givers’ health, wealth and life satisfaction — especially when we can see the faces of the people we are helping. Was this the secret to building a better life and happier world?

Excited by these findings, I discussed them with my wife, Ester. Always practical, she suggested that we put my research to the test in our own lives. “I just read that there are millions of abandoned little girls in China,” she said. “I think we should adopt one of them.”

My immediate response: “Hey, it’s only a book!”

Many people are anxious about adoption, although the source of those anxieties has changed over the decades. In a study in the 1980s, the sociologist Charlene E. Miall surveyed a large group of childless women. Many of the interviewees reported a widespread perception that the lack of biological ties must hurt the parent-child bond. They feared that society saw adopted children as second-rate, and adoptive parents as not “real” parents.

But today the most common concerns about adoption have shifted from cultural worries to financial and logistical ones. According to the National Foster Care Adoption Attitudes Survey, by 2013 the top two of eight potential concerns for those considering adoption were coping with paperwork and expense.

The world’s brightest minds sketch a bleak picture of the future of Planet Earth. Is it too late to save our species and preserve the environment?

By Jasper Hamill

GETTY IMAGES

The scientists believe environmental impacts were likely to inflict ‘substantial and irreversible harm’ to the Earth

MORE than 15,000 scientists from around the world have signed a terrifying letter warning of an imminent apocalypse.

The message is called “Warning to Humanity” and is an ominous vision of the grim fate awaiting Planet Earth.

The message updates an original Warning from the Union of Concerned Scientists, which was made in 1992.

Now the global scientific community’s view of the future is even bleaker.

Apart from the hole in the ozone layer, which has now been stabilised, every one of the major threats identified in 1992 has worsened.

Runaway consumption of precious resources by an exploding population remains the biggest danger facing humankind, say the scientists.

They urge “scientists, media influencers and lay citizens” to put pressure on governments to reverse the trend.

A host of environmental calamities are highlighted in the warning notice, including catastrophic climate change, deforestation, mass species extinction, ocean “dead zones”, and lack of access to fresh water.

The Last Known Painting by Leonardo da Vinci Just Sold for $450.3 Million

After weeks of anticipation, it finally happened: Leonardo da Vinci‘s Salvator Mundi (circa 1500), billed as the last known painting by the Renaissance master in private hands, sold at Christie’s for $450.3 million. It is, by far, the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction. In fact, the price is more than double the next most expensive work ever sold, Picasso’s Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’), which fetched $179.4 million in 2015.

The work went to an anonymous client of Alex Rotter, Christie’s global co-head of contemporary art. Before a packed salesroom and scores of camera phones held aloft, bidding opened at $70 million. At $190 million, five bidders—four on the phones and one in the room—were still chasing the painting.

The 19-minute contest eventually came down to Rotter and Francois De Poortere, the head of Christie’s Old Master painting department in New York.

At $352 million, auctioneer Jussi Pylkkanen produced a glass of ice water from behind the rostrum and took a sip.

After a protracted bidding war in which Rotter’s client continued to bid in increments as large as $30 million—and De Poortere’s client bid in smaller steps of around $2–5 million—the work hammered down for $400 million to a flurry of applause (and a few gasps). With the auction house’s fees, the final price was $450.3 million.

In an era of USC-UCLA pranks, one stood out. Sixty years later, its mystery is solved

A septuagenarian professor and former USC student, having caught wind of a forthcoming story in the Los Angeles Times, recently sent a cryptic email to the newspaper.

Sixty years ago, the professor, Dayle Barnes, belonged to an organization at USC called the Trojan Squires, which pulled off one of the most memorable in a long line of pranks in USC’s rivalry with UCLA. For the game at the Coliseum in 1957, UCLA’s student section had planned a series of card stunts. The UCLA students were to hold up placards that would combine to form Bruins-friendly words and pictures.

Except when the students actually did hold up their cards, they had been altered by a band of USC saboteurs. In each stunt, the unwitting UCLA students revealed a different pro-USC message. It caused such a stir that Sports Illustrated wrote about the prank — without interviewing its creators.

Barnes wrote in the email that reporting about the prank’s creators would be a “tough assignment” given “the complete secrecy with which the clandestine group of Trojan Squires” operated.

He explained that though he was part of the Squires, the prank was conceived and executed by a small, elite unit within the organization, operating under deep cover. Barnes didn’t know their identities.

“That is not to deny, however, that more than a few of that year’s membership were eminently qualified, by background and personality, successfully to conduct a covert assignment,” he wrote.

The mystery endured among the dwindling population of USC and UCLA alumni who keep score of such pranks. There would be no answer for 60 years.

PREHISTORIC, DINOSAUR-ERA SHARK WITH INSANE TEETH FOUND SWIMMING OFF COAST OF PORTUGAL

This fish is rarely seen by humans but has lived on the Earth since long before man.

The rare frilled shark is considered a “living fossil” because evidence of its existence dates back to at least 80 million years ago. This summer, researchers found one alive and thriving off the coast of Portugal, uncovering more clues about the resilience of this ancient sea creature.

The researchers who discovered the shark off the Algarve coast were working on a European Union project in the area, the BBC reported. The goal of the project was to “minimize unwanted catches in commercial fishing,” the researchers told SIC Noticisas TV, as the BBC noted, but the team unknowingly unearthed one of the rarest and most ancient animals on the planet.

Scientists believe the frilled shark has remained the same, both inside and out, since the Cretaceous Period, when the Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops still roamed the planet. The creature, known by scientists as Chlamydoselachus anguineus, is incredibly simple and unevolved, most likely due to the lack of nutrients found in its deep-sea dwellings. A Japanese study of the shark found in Suruga Bay, Japan, revealed that its diet is 61 percent cephalopods—the class to which squids and octopus belong.

Christmas Music Can Harm Your Mental Health, Psychologist Says

CBS Local — Are you one of those people that can’t stand hearing Christmas songs months before the holiday actually arrives? Does hearing festive carols weeks before Thanksgiving only make you upset that you haven’t eaten your turkey yet? A psychologist in Great Britain says your reactions don’t make you a Grinch because too much Christmas music is actually bad for your mental health.

Clinical psychologist Linda Blair claims the constant barrage of Christmas tunes too early in the season forces people to remember all the things they have to do before the holiday. Blair says the songs are a reminder to buy presents, cater parties, organize travel, and all the more stressful chores during Christmas.

Faith No More’s Chuck Mosley Dead at 57

Former Faith No More frontman Chuck Mosley has died. After years of sobriety, Mosley passed away on Friday November 9 “due to the disease of addiction,” according to a statement from his family. “He is survived by long-term partner Pip Logan, two daughters, Erica and Sophie and his grandson Wolfgang Logan Mosley,” the note continues. “The family will be accepting donations for funeral expenses.”

Mosley rose to prominence in the dynamic punk scene of Los Angeles in the early 80s, where he first joined the band Animated with future Faith No More bassist Billy Gould. After joining Faith No More in 1983, Mosley sang on their first two albums, 1985’s We Care A Lot and 1987’s Introduce Yourself, both of which helped establish the band as a powerhouse in funk and metal circles.

Mosley was fired from Faith No More in 1988, going on to sue the band, claiming a partnership stake, which they settled out of court. Later spending years fronting hardcore legends Bad Brains, Mosley also formed the band Cement later in the 90s. With an unpredictable energy, he continued releasing solo albums into the new millennium, eventually reuniting with Faith No More for two shows in 2016, following a reissue of the 1985 classic We Care A Lot.

The middle finger is way older than you think.

While Trump’s motorcade was cruising through Sterling, Virginia, they passed Briskman who was on her bike. Briskman, realizing who was pulling past her, extended her arm and popped up that wonderful, old as time, middle finger salute to America’s special liddle guy. As a result of pulling of the much loved stunt, the 50-year-old Briskman was fired by her government contractor employer.

However, the hero of this tale is a defiant one and told Huffpo that she’d “do it again” if given the chance.

But what was Briskman really saying with that single digit salute?

Well, as I’m sure you know, the finger is one of the most cherished gestures in the Western world. It’s how we show disapproval to those who can’t hear our vulgarities for whatever reason, it’s how I tell that chachi dude in the black truck that he almost ran me down in a crosswalk, and, if you’re the Canadian editor of VICE Sports, how you say hello to me in the morning.

The history of the finger isn’t completely concrete, but, as Benjamin Bergen, director of the Language and Cognition Lab at the University of California in San Diego explains, we know flipping people off goes back not just centuries but millennia.

“We know that it goes back, at least, to Greek times,” Bergen told VICE. “It shows up in some Greek plays and where it’s juxtaposed with other sorts of vulgar gestures, like the waggling of a penis for example. We also know that from records that it also showed up in plays in Roman times and in accounts of senate chamber conflict and so on.”

“We know that it had a name in Roman times where it was called the indecent or impudent finger, the Digitus Impudicus. It continues for the following millennium as we know, there are some urban myths people tell about the origins but as far as we can tell none of them are true, it really has a several thousand year history.”

We humans like to pretend we know a lot about space and the various objects that we’ve observed in it, but at the end of the day we find ourselves scratching our heads more often than not. The latest and perhaps best example of this is a star called iPTF14hls, which keeps exploding but refuses to actually die, like some sort of stellar zombie. Isn’t space awesome?

Typically, when a star explodes in a supernova, it’s a sign that the star is progressing in its life cycle, erupting in a firestorm that decimates everything in its path and ultimately results in either a burnt out blob of incredibly dense matter, a neutron star, or even a black hole. iPTF14hls refuses to do any of those things, and has instead decided to just keep exploding over and over again.

In a new research paper published in Nature, scientists reveal their observations of the peculiar star, and do everything in their power to explain how this could even be possible. The researchers explain that a supernova of the star was observed way back in 1954, at which point science would have us believe that it was about to move past that stage and enter whatever comes next, but that’s not what happened.

A Global Shortage of Magnetic Tape Leaves Cassette Fans Reeling

Brisk demand from old and new fans prompts a Missouri company to return to a long-paused business

By Ryan Dezember and Anne Steele

SPRINGFIELD, Mo.—Steve Stepp and his team of septuagenarian engineers are using a bag of rust, a kitchen mixer larger than a man and a 62-foot-long contraption that used to make magnetic strips for credit cards to avert a disaster that no one saw coming in the digital-music era.

Jeff Koons: When the opportunity to work with Louis Vuitton came about, I thought, This is the perfect company: It has tremendous resources, it understands aesthetics, and it’s used to communicating to people through materialism.

As in, people who buy purses are materialistic?
When I say that, I mean through materials—being able to adjust the textures of leather or to enhance color and dyes through different coloring techniques.

Playing with surfaces has been a preoccupation in your art for years.
What art is, for me, is the possibility that when someone views something, they’re able to pick up on the essence of their own potential: It’s a vehicle—something that stimulates their own excitement.

In your mind, is there a creative difference between making a mass-market purse for Louis Vuitton and a $5 million sculpture?
It’s not like I collaborate with people where there’s differences, or tension, or the possibility of an outcome that’s different from what I intended. I try to choose collaborations where we both really believe in a commitment to the viewer—where you can both communicate that what you really care about is them.

Richard Hambleton, ‘Shadowman’of the ’80s Art Scene, Dies at 65

In the early 1980s, when graffiti seemed to be everywhere, hundreds of startling black-painted silhouettes appeared mysteriously on buildings on the Lower East Side and in other parts of Manhattan. The spectral, life-size, menacing figures lurked and skulked and leapt. Some of their heads, with paint splattered upward, seemed to be exploding.

Richard Hambleton, the Canadian-born conceptual artist who painted them all (sometimes after fleeing the police, paint bucket in hand), was known as “the Shadowman.”

“I painted the town black,” Mr. Hambleton told People magazine in 1984. “They could represent watchmen or danger or the shadows of a human body after a nuclear holocaust or even my own shadow.”

He became part of the downtown art scene with his contemporaries Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat at Club 57, a basement bar on St. Marks Place in the East Village that is the subject of a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, complete with one of Mr. Hambleton’s “Shadowman” works.

30 DAYS OF DEAD

If you’ve been part of the Dead.net community for the past few years, then you know we’re on a mission to make a miracle every day in the month of November. This year is no different.

As a token of our appreciation for making 2017 an epic year, we’re giving away a high-quality 320Kbps MP3 download every day this month. That’s 30 days of unreleased Grateful Dead tracks from the vault, selected by Dead archivist and producer David Lemieux! Intrigued? We’re also going to put your knowledge to the test and give you a chance daily to win a limited-edition 7″ single, the 1st release from our 2017 series.

Here’s how it works:

You know your Ables from your Bakers from your C’s, but can your finely tuned ears differentiate the cosmic “comeback” tour from a spacey 70’s show? Each day we’ll post a free download from one of the Dead’s coveted shows. Will it be from that magical night at Madison Square Garden in ’93 or from way back when they were just starting to warm it up at Winterland? Is that Pigpen’s harmonica we hear? Brent on keys? Step right up and try your hand all November long.

Guess the venue and date correctly and you’ll be automatically entered to win the prize of the day. Each day a winner will be selected at random, so take your time and make your best guess! Answer correctly, and you will also be automatically entered for our Grand Prize – a copy of our SOLD OUT MAY 1977: GET SHOWN THE LIGHT boxed set.